THE REAL MEANING OF SABBATH

“The Jews said to the man who had been healed, ‘It is the Sabbath; the Law forbids you to carry your mat.’ But he replied, ‘The man who made me well said to me, “Pick up your mat and walk.” So, they replied, ‘Who is this fellow who told you to pick it up and walk?’” John 5:10-12 (NIV).

Why was the Sabbath such a big issue for the Jews? They were constantly attacking Jesus for not observing the Sabbath the way they thought He should. Jesus healed people on the Sabbath, and they were angry with Him because they saw it as ‘work’. One of their sins in their past was their failure to observe the Sabbath. Sabbath was a sign of the covenant between them and God and the thing that set them apart from all other nations.

To keep the Sabbath meant that they had to trust God. Firstly, they had to know that the God they worshipped was real. Secondly, to take a day off and to do no work meant that they earned no money on that day. It meant that they were worth more to God than the work they did and that they were willing to trust Him to provide for them.

But, to the Pharisees, Sabbath-keeping was much more than that. They had made Sabbath- keeping one of the reasons for God to accept them. They missed the real purpose of the Sabbath. It wasn’t a rule to be kept but God’s mercy to them to get them out of the cycle of working and sleeping. It was to be a day of rest.

Jesus was showing the people God’s mercy by healing sick people on the Sabbath. Healing was not ‘work’, it was mercy and God’s law was about mercy. Therefore, to heal on the Sabbath was not to break the law but to do the right thing. Jesus came to show us what the Father is like. God is merciful. He did not give us His law to bring us into bondage but to set us free from our own selfishness and greed.

The Pharisees did not understand this. Jesus offended Him because He did not keep the Sabbath the way they believed. They attacked the man who had been healed and tried to make him guilty because Jesus told him to pick up his mat. When He found him in the temple, the place where he had gone to show himself to the priests so that he could offer a sacrifice for his healing, Jesus urged him to leave his life of sin.

Jesus wasn’t concerned about the Pharisees’ accusations because they were not true, but He was concerned about something more important, that sin brought unpleasant consequences. He wanted the healed man to stop sinning so that nothing worse would happen to him. 

This story is a lesson for us. Righteousness is about doing right, not about not doing wrong. To show mercy to someone is need is to do the right thing. This is what pleases God.